Awake while you play? Weird! :P

Kidding aside, if you can find or improvise any way for the Deck to stay where you want it to be without having to hold it with your hands (for example, place it on your lap), I still recommend the joy-cons. The arm freedom is amazing.

Other split controllers are available, for example certain VR controllers.

To the user who downvoted me and hasn’t posted on Lemmy in more than a year… Idk what to say actually, it’s weird that you’d do that.

I haven’t tried it on the Deck yet, but expect it to work:

Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons. Lean the Deck (or Switch) on its side on something, such that with your head on the pillow you can look at it. With one joy-con in each hand, you can reposition your arms however you want and independently of each other.

This method with Ace Attorney games on the Switch is my sleeping pill. Works amazingly well for me. After I finish my current Ace Attorney game, I plan to finally try it with the Steam Deck and a different visual novel.

Foreseeable caveat: charging the joy-cons will be annoying. If you put them in a Switch to charge (which is my only charging solution right now), they get paired to it automatically and will need to be re-paired with the Deck.

Also, leaning the Steam Deck on its side won’t be as easy as it is for the Switch. Might have to improvise something for that.

In the Steam hardware survey, under Video Card Description, you can find: Steam Deck GPU - 0.45%.

Random sources online for which I cannot find a source (though I didn’t really look much) say Steam has 132 million monthly active users.

If we take both of those figures at face value, assume being a monthly active user on Steam is a good proxy for “in use”, then that makes 594,000 Steam Decks in active use.

This is far less than the sales figure that @breadsmasher@lemmy.world cited, which could be a combination of a lot of factors:

1. Steam Decks which have been sold but are not in active use for whatever reason.
2. The monthly active users figure for Steam seems low to me for a platform as big as Steam. It could be wrong.
3. It is possible that Steam Deck users are under-represented in the Steam Hardware Survey, and they make up a bigger percentage of Steam users. Maybe they are less likely to participate in it?
4. People might be using Steam Deck for other purposes besides Steam, so they are not active Steam users. Personally I doubt this is a significant factor.
5. Some users might participate in the hardware survey more than once, causing the calculation to be wrong. I’m not sure how the hardware survey works, but this could be a huge factor.
6. Who know what else I didn’t think of.

If you’re in the CachyOS Discord and have a lot of patience, this is where I dumped all of my complaints and feedback on the day that I really tried to use it: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934

Keep in mind I was pretty new to Cachy/Arch and coming from Linux Mint, make of that what you will.

More specifically, this is what raised the alarm for me: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934/1500507281840668852 and following messages.

Basically, I tried to install openrgb-next-git from AUR using Shelly. The operation failed but was reported as successful. And the Shelly dev I was chatting with didn’t really seem to acknowledge the severity of the issue. After many more attempts, I eventually gave up on Shelly installed the package using paru. I don’t remember if there was any problem during that installation, but it did get installed in the end, which is more than I can say for Shelly.

This exchange was 2 months ago, so it’s possible that things have improved since then, but that’s not enough time for me to give Shelly another chance yet.

What I’m about to say is pure speculation, and I have no concrete evidence, just my gut: I think Shelly, or at least its GUI, is vibe-coded. Too many things about it are half-baked but with the appearance of polish. Windows and dialogs that look pretty but are too small for their contents. No way a human developer would push that if it was tested even once.

A Shelly developer explained to me that it’s not a wrapper for pacman or any other tool, instead they re-implement the functionality provided by pacman using a lower-level library. To this I say: Shelly has not earned my trust in their code to manage packages on my main PC. When it’s more mature, when it has more eyes on it, and when it doesn’t give me the half-baked vibe, I’ll happily give it another chance.

CachyOS now ships with and recommends Shelly, and just from trying to use it I get the feeling it’s fundamentally flawed (both in the front-end and back-end), but I don’t know enough about package management to know for certain.

What are those benefits?

I’m definitely not one of those, but kind of playing devil’s advocate, you have to acknowledge that the more people there are who can’t/won’t take certain meds/ingredients, the more pressure there is on the industry to make alternatives, and this could be a genuine silver lining in an otherwise really shitty situation.

The whole gluten-free craze created a ton of market pressure to produce good, tasty gluten-free foods. This was genuinely fantastic for people with coeliac disease, suddenly there’s a ton of options for them to eat at mainstream places! The gluten-free movement (no pun intended) may have been dumb, and maybe it caused some harm (did it?), but it definitely caused a significant amount of good, even if by accident.

I know it’s not the same situation and it’s still obviously wrong to be happy with what these ticks do, but you can still take the good with the bad.

I’ll admit something slightly embarrassing.

This has kinda sorta been the case for quite a while now, people have been installing Steam Deck versions of SteamOS on various AMD machines with various levels of success. It was also acknowledged by Valve, with an “at your own risk” policy.

But idiot me thought “AMD platforms” means the CPU needs to be AMD. So just FYI to anyone in the same boat: no, Intel CPUs should work just fine. The only thing they meant is that the GPU has to be AMD. All the other components can kind of be whatever the heck you want. Including CPU, as long as it’s x86-64.

But actually, I understand they now also support Intel GPUs. I think I’ve read that somewhere. So at this point it’s pretty clear that you can use anything expect nvidia.

I am not the least bit surprised.

When they first announced it so soon after the Steam Machine was announced, it couldn’t have been more obvious that it’s unlicensed. There’s just no way they could have secured a license from Valve that fast.

After that though, you might think they had plenty of time to reach out and make a deal. And yes, I did half expect them to do this instead of being complete idiots, but judging by the sheer confidence they showed in the original announcement, being complete idiots is also likely.

I am slightly annoyed at Valve for waiting up until the last possible minute to send that C&D, considering they HAD to know about this product right from the start. But I get it. Giving Valve the maximum benefit of the doubt, they could have decided to wait for dbrand to contact them, and they probably already worked up the terms by which they’d license their IP. But as a sort of power play combined with a test of character, they needed dbrand to be the one to make contact first. And they just waited for that to happen, because dbrand HAD to get a license from them, right? Alas, dbrand failed the test of character. Damn.

Interesting. I haven’t found it, but I did just spot the pinned comment in under the Gamers Nexus video: “TEAR-DOWN coming up next!” So I guess I’ll just wait for that :)

Has anyone made a Steam Machine teardown video? I wanna see how this thing is built. All I’ve seen is that there’s a bunch of hardware basically clipping through a giant heatsink. Has anyone disassembled it further than that in a video?

I know the RAM is technically upgradeable, has any video shown how to access it?

(I did watch the whole GN video but I wasn’t paying full attention so maybe they showed it and I missed it)

They still might. After the buyers are selected in the raffle, they might have the chance to state a preference before the order is finalized.

Help out a Deck newbie. I’m on the beta channel, so:

1. Is the new update just a copy of the last update to the beta channel?
2. If not (e.g. there are some bug fixes or tweaks for the proper release), then do I get the update as part of the beta channel? Or should I switch to the stable channel?

This title could not look more like an ad. I’m not saying it is an ad (full disclosure, I didn’t even click the link), but if a company is trying to market their new toothpaste with “natural” ingredients sprinkled in, this is exactly the title they’d go for. The title doesn’t even make a single claim of anything new being done.

No, they meant that literally https://esolangs.org/wiki/I_use_Arch_btw

Genuinely can’t tell if you’re missing the joke or you’re just committed to playing the straight man.

I’m actually disappointed this isn’t a real package. https://archlinux.org/packages/?q=btw

Linux newbies shouldn’t use Arch imho

I forgot to mention. Turns out PWAsForFirefox doesn’t work at all with the Flatpak version of Firefox https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox/issues/142 so the whole question is moot. The project’s dev seems to be actively involved in making that possible though. I guess I’ll live without nice web-apps on the steam deck for now, it’s not a deal breaker.